HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Routine Management Tasks

Booting HP-UX on HP 9000 (PA-RISC) Systems: Details and Variations
A Standard Boot (PA-RISC Systems)
Here are more details about what happens during a typical HP-UX boot-up sequence
on an HP 9000 System. If you are booting an HP Integrity Server see “Booting HP-UX
on HP Integrity Servers: Details and Variations” (page 38).
1. Power on external devices: If necessary, turn on all external peripherals and
devices that are attached to your computer (for example, disk drives, tape drives,
printers, terminals, bus converters).
Once the devices have completed their self-check tests, proceed to the next step.
2. Power on your system (or nPartition): Turn on or reset the computer or nPartition.
System hardware or hardware associated with an nPartition you are booting will
go through a series of self-tests to verify that the processors, memory, and other
system components are in working order.
3. Boot device selection: Your system (or the nPartition you are booting) must
locate a kernel file to boot from. There are two parts to the search:
Part 1 determine the hardware path to the boot device
Part 2 determine which kernel file on the hardware path to boot (see Step 4)
Path variables stored in non-volatile memory set up to three possible boot paths
from which to attempt a boot:
PRI The PRImary boot path is the first boot path to try. Set the value of this path
to point to the device from which you will boot most often.
HAA The High-Availability Alternate boot path, on systems that support it, is
the path you want your system to boot from should your primary boot path
fail.
ALT The ALTernate boot path is the hardware path to an alternate boot source
(for example, a tape drive, network-based boot source, or optical disc drive).
On some systems only the primary boot path is automatically tried. On those
systems, in order to boot from the alternate boot path you need to override the 10
second autoboot delay.
On other systems, firmware can be configured to associate various boot actions
with each boot path. These boot actions allow you to tell the system:
• whether to attempt or ignore a boot path
• if unsuccessful booting from a boot path, whether or not to try the next path
in the sequence PRI -> HAA -> ALT
• whether or not to use the Boot Console Handler (BCH) interface
For information about the specific hardware paths available on your system, refer
to the output of ioscan (see ioscan(1M) for details on how to run ioscan). Also,
some path information is physically printed on your system.
Booting Systems 57